Thursday, May 31, 2012

Shoddy Journalism

During a Q&A exchange of the ''Leadership Renewal The Fourth Generation and Beyond" Kent Ridge Ministerial Forum at NUS in April 2007, a second year sociology major was trying to complete his question, "... we are doing absolutely badly and this is exacerbated by the fact that although Singapore is a First World country, it has a Third World wage structure - and this is according to the Straits Times, not from anywhere else. And even Professor Tommy Koh ..."
PM Lee cut him off with : "Do you believe everything you read in the Straits Times?"

Low Thia Khiang has made it clear he doesn't, but he's probably more upset about the political innocents who might be mortified by misleading headlines or picture captions. After all, Francis Seow's book "The Media Enthralled: Singapore Revisited" is not easily available at the book shelves here.

The newspaper that was once ranked 154th out of 195 in the "2007 Freedom of the Press World Ranking" by "Freedom House" is crying foul. Never mind if a United States diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks once quoted Chua Chin Hon, the Straits Times' U.S. bureau chief, saying that the paper's "editors have all been groomed as pro-government supporters and are careful to ensure that reporting of local events adheres closely to the official line", and that "the government exerts significant pressure on ST editors to ensure that published articles follow the government's line".

Thanks to the exchange of letters in the Forum page we now know that the Secret Squirrel was in direct email communication with the Straits Times, and not any other publication. We also know that they chose the date of publication, which opens up another can of worms - was the timing intended to inflict maximum collateral damage? Low said in the post election conference his party did not have the resources to investigate the matter, but SPH has. All they need to do is to check the mail header, and lots of interesting things can be found, such as the source of posting. If the Tin Pei Ling example is anything to go by, even the law enforcement folks may not have the political will to complete the detective work. Last time we checked, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein do not work in the shitty times.

The amount of injustice allowed to prevail over the opposition wards is unacceptable. Starting with the appointment of the Grassroots Adviser, what in the world is that?, and to imagine that the Opposition MP needs approval from a losing candidate to carry on improvements to the ward itself. I wonder how the legislations have been so twisted to allow such things to happen.

Pritam Singh highlighted that FREE upgrading of lifts to every floor for twenty odd blocks has been rejected by the Grass root adviser. I understand politics to be dirty, but not in this way and why the MSM find it not newsworthy. I didnt know until now.

I don't think people read much from the newspapers nowadays. There isn't much quality content or anything worthwhile to read about. Most people just flip over the pages and they're done with the reading within 5 minutes. It has a fact, circulation of those major newspapers is on a declining trend. My office doesn't subscribe for any newspapers. I myself get most of my news online or through some subscribed magazines such as Economist. I don't even bother to read those free newspapers that are given out in the various MRT stations.

If you hang out in coffeeshops or hawker centres on a Saturday, it is very telling. People don't read the news but the classfieds first esp for property and the like! So ST is going on strong because of these ads. Take it away and you may not get the ST.

The state-controlled main stream media,ST And Media Corp,had been fxxking the citizens brains for decades. It had already lost the propaganda war to the social media. The Internet has forced them to report fairly but it does not matter anymore as the citizens distrust of the msm is both deep and wide

Warren Fernandez used to write very high-brow bombastic opinion pieces extolling the PAP and the Old man when he was at the ST previously.Now as Editor and assuming he wrote that weak and indefensible reply to LTK, you must know he wasclutching on straws to come up with an excuse

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About Me

"There is nothing to prevent you from pushing your propaganda, to push your programme out either to the students or with the public at large... and if you can carry the ground, if you are right, you win. That's democracy. We're not preventing anybody" ~ Lee Kuan Yew, 31 January 2005